Figuring out budget can be tough, especially for new initiatives like advocate marketing—but understanding the costs can help.

You already learnt where you can get funds for advocate marketing in our previous blog. (Hint: it’s from initiatives you already pay for!)

Here’s how you can establish a budget to help convince your boss.

(P.S. If you want our complete guide of creating a justifying budget for advocate marketing, download this guide.)

How much does advocacy cost?

While costs for your program will vary, here are the two main costs associated with effectively running an advocate marketing program:

1. Advocate marketing software

Having a centralized platform to interact with your customers makes creating strong, personal relationships with hundreds of advocates possible. It will also give your advocates an experience one person with spreadsheets and emails can’t replicate. An advocate marketing platform makes sharing content and opportunities with advocates scalable. It also automates the recognition process so advocates get instantaneous feedback that drives them to engage. Finally, it should also integrate with your current tech stack to make advocate management seamless across functions.

Software pricing for advocate marketing platforms is usually based on:

The number of advocates (or advocate persona types) in your program

Product add-ons, such as enhanced reporting and referral features

The level of customer support you want

Many companies can expect to pay between $2,000 and $4,000 per month for an advocate marketing platform. Enterprise companies can expect to invest more depending on the size of their advocate base and program complexity.

2. Rewards and recognition

The most effective advocate marketing programs give advocates special perks, recognition amongst their peers and occasional tokens of appreciation. These incentives often include low-cost rewards (such as gift cards or swag) and higher value items (like tickets to your annual conference).

Sometimes it’s easier to set an monthly reward budget and then limit the monetary rewards that can be redeemed by advocates to stay within your budget. (Try setting aside about 20% of your software costs.)

The key is to communicate this limit with your advocates so they aren’t disappointed. It will also motivate them to complete challenges faster so they can redeem prizes before they’re gone.

For example, let’s say your goal is to get 100 referrals this year, and you consider the value of a referral to be $20. If you hit your goal, you’ll spend $2,000 to get 100 referrals.

However, before you set aside $2,000, you should know that only 20% of advocates redeem their points for rewards. This means that you’ll likely pay only $400 for 100 referrals (or $4 per advocate). It’s a good idea to budget a bit more than you need, so plan for a 50% points redemption rate for all of your challenge to prevent yourself from running low on funds. In this example, you’d budget $1,000 for referrals to be safe. Follow the same principle for any other advocacy challenges that you plan, such as reference requests or writing blog posts.

“In terms of rewards, we have found that only advocates who provide real value (in the form of reviews, testimonials, or referrals) tend to redeem prizes—so it just feels like we’re saying thanks!”

How to build a budget to convince your boss

Example: Acme Co. has decided to cut their booth and sponsorship at one event this year that costs $20,000. They plan to decrease their PR retainer spend by $10,000 per month for 6 months and collect more customer stories using an advocacy platform. They will also eliminate a product feedback and NPS survey tool they use, which costs $15,000 per year. Instead, they will use their advocacy platform to collect this data. The total cost savings for the year is $95,000.

They plan to spend $3,500 per month on software to facilitate the management of their advocate marketing program, and $700 per month on rewards and recognition (20% of software costs).

Item

Cost / Month

Advocacy platform software

$3,500 x 12 = $42,000

Reward costs

$700 x 12 = $8,400

Total budget needed by Acme Co.

$50,400

Don’t Think You Have Budget For Advocate Marketing?

Want to implement an advocate marketing program, but worried you won’t have enough funds to make it a success? Learn where you'll find budget for advocacy in this guide.

Jillian Wood was formerly the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Influitive. With a background in online writing and editing, she is passionate about creating the best web content every day—and all things tech and marketing.
More posts by Jillian

We’re glad you’re here! Help us give you the best site experience by enabling cookies so we can customize your experience. By continuing to browse or closing this banner, you indicate your agreement to our privacy policy. To opt out of cookie tracking please click here.